U.S. and Chinese warships battle at sea, firing everything from cannons to cruise missiles to lasers. Stealthy Russian and American fighter jets dogfight in the air, with robotic drones flying as their wingmen. Hackers in Shanghai and Silicon Valley duel in digital playgrounds. And fights in outer space decide who wins below on Earth. Are theses scenes from a novel or what could actually take place in the real world the day after tomorrow? The answer is both.

Great power conflicts defined the 20th century: Two world wars claimed tens of millions of lives, and the Cold War that followed shaped everything from geopolitics to sports. But at the start of the 21st century, the ever-present fear of World War III seemed to be in our historic rearview mirror.

Yet that risk of the past has made a dark comeback. Russian land grabs in Ukraine and constant flights of bombers decorated with red stars probing Europe’s borders have put NATO at its highest levels of alert since the mid 1980s. In the Pacific, the U.S. and a newly powerful and assertive China are engaged in a massive arms race. China built more warships and warplanes than any other nation during the last several years, while the Pentagon just announced a strategy to “offset” it with a new generation of high-tech weapons. Indeed, it’s likely China’s alleged recent hack of federal records at the Office of Personnel Management was not about cyber crime, but a classic case of what is known as “preparing the battlefield,” gaining access to government databases and personal records just in case.

The worry is that the brewing 21st century Cold War with China and its junior partner Russia could at some point turn hot. “A U.S.-China war is inevitable” recently warned the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper after recent military face-offs over rights of passage and artificial islands built in disputed territory. This may be a bit of posturing both for U.S. policymakers and a highly nationalist domestic audience: A 2014 poll by the Perth U.S.-Asia center found that 74% of Chinese think their military would win in a war with the U.S. But it points to how the global context is changing. Many Chinese officers have begun to lament out loud what they call “peace disease,” their term for never having served in combat.

World War II: Photos We Remember

In a picture that captures the violence and sheer destruction inherent in war perhaps more graphically than any other ever published in LIFE, Marines take cover on an Iwo Jima hillside amid the burned-out remains of banyan jungle, as a Japanese bunker is obliterated in March 1945.

W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

In this and dozens of other, similar pictures made at New York's Penn Station in 1944, LIFE's Alfred Eisenstaedt captured a private moment repeated in public millions of times over the course of the war: a guy, a girl, a goodbye - and no assurance that he'll make it back. By war's end, more than 400,000 American troops had been killed.

Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

During 1940's Battle of Britain, Luftwaffe bombers tried to destroy British air power ahead of a planned invasion of the UK. When that failed, Hitler resorted to terror attacks on civilians, including the full-scale bombing of London (pictured) and other English towns. The attacks killed tens of thousands of Britons, but "The Blitz" fizzled: the invasion never materialized.

William Vandivert—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Three American soldiers lie half-buried in the sand at Buna Beach on New Guinea. This photo was taken in February 1943, but not published until September, when it became the first image of dead American troops to appear in LIFE during World War II. George Strock's photo was finally OK'd by government censors, in part because FDR feared the public was growing complacent about the war's horrific toll.

George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

The Statue of Liberty, photographed during a blackout in 1942 - an eloquent expression of the nation's mood in the first full year of a global conflict with no real end in sight.

Andreas Feininger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Members of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, commonly known as WAACs, don their first gas masks at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, in June 1942. The female troops were famously praised by General Douglas MacArthur, who called them "my best soldiers."

Marie Hansen—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

A photo taken by Hitler's personal photographer (and later acquired by LIFE) shows a 1939 rally in which Hitler salutes Luftwaffe troops who fought with Francisco Franco's ultra-right wing nationalist rebels in the Spanish Civil War.

Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Soldiers goose-step past the Fhrer in honor of Hitler's 50th birthday, April 20, 1939. Less than five months later, on September 1, the Third Reich's forces invaded Poland.

Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Austrians cheer Adolf Hitler during his 1938 campaign to unite Austria and Germany. In the rapt faces, straining bodies, and adulation of the crowds swept up in Hitler's mad vision, one senses the eagerness of millions to forge a "Thousand Year Reich" at, literally, any cost.

Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

In a photo that somehow comprises both tenderness and horror, an American Marine cradles a near-dead infant pulled from under a rock while troops cleared Japanese fighters and civilians from caves on Saipan in the summer of 1944. The child was the only person found alive among hundreds of corpses in one cave.

W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

The home front: At Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, a visiting New York Giant is caught in a rundown in the summer of 1943. At a time when seemingly everything in America - race relations, gender roles, the country's very idea of itself - was undergoing profound change, the national pastime offered an antidote to anxiety and dread. Namely, something familiar. Something unchanging.

Wallace Kirkland—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Members of the U.S. Army Air Corps' legendary 99th Pursuit Squadron, the Tuskegee Airmen, receive instruction about wind currents from a lieutenant in 1942. The Tuskegee fliers - the nation's first African American air squadron - served with distinction in the segregated American military.

Gabriel Benzur—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

A welder at a boat-and-sub-building yard adjusts her goggles before resuming work, October, 1943. By 1945, women comprised well over a third of the civilian labor force (in 1940, it was closer to a quarter) and millions of those jobs were filled in factories: building bombers, manufacturing munitions, welding, drilling and riveting for the war effort.

Bernard Hoffman—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Army medic George Lott, wounded in both arms in November, 1944, grimaces as doctors mold a cast to his body. When Lott embarked on a 4,500-mile, seven-hospital journey of recovery, photographer Ralph Morse - astonished by the high level of medical care wounded troops received both at the front and behind the lines - traveled with him, and chronicled Lott's odyssey in a revelatory cover story for LIFE.

Ralph Morse—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Photographer W. Eugene Smith's picture of a Marine drinking from his canteen during 1944's Battle of Saipan is as iconic a war picture as any ever made. In fact, when the U.S. Postal Service released a "Masters of American Photography" series of commemorative stamps in 2002, Smith was included - and this image was chosen as representative of his body of work.

W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Unpublished. An exemplar of a bitter, grueling land battle, Iwo Jima also saw prodigious air and sea power brought to bear as American and Japanese troops clashed over control of the tiny Pacific island. American forces finally captured Iwo Jima - and its two strategic airfields - in late March, 1945.

W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Unpublished. A crew maneuvers an enormous piece of artillery during the Battle of Saipan, 1944. In the waning days of the struggle for the island, thousands of Japanese civilians and troops committed suicide, rather than surrender to American troops. Many leapt to their death from the top of sheer cliffs that fall 200 feet to rocks and surf below.

Peter Stackpole—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Unpublished. American troops chat near a dead Japanese soldier on Iwo Jima. The degree to which the Japanese were willing to fight to the death, rather than surrender, is summed up in one remarkable statistic: Close to 20,000 Japanese soldiers were killed during the battle; only around 200 were captured.

W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

GIs tramp in review across an English field, 1944, as the long-planned Operation Overlord - the D-Day invasion of France - draws near. With 160,000 Allied troops taking part, the cross-Channel attack was the single greatest air-land-and-sea invasion in military history.

Frank Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Unpublished. An American Marine readies to land on Guadalcanal during the five-month struggle for the island between late 1942 and early 1943. Three thousand miles south of Tokyo, Guadalcanal was a major shipping point for military supplies. The Allied victory there in February, 1943, marked a major turning point in the war after a string of Japanese victories in the Pacific.

Joe Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

American troops in the Philippines celebrate the long-awaited news that Japan has, finally, unconditionally, surrendered in August 1945.

Carl Mydans—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Peace at last: V-J Day, Times Square, August 14, 1945.

Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

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Wars start through any number of pathways: One world war happened through deliberate action, the other was a crisis that spun out of control. In the coming decades, a war might ignite accidentally, such as by two opposing warships trading paint near a reef not even marked on a nautical chart. Or it could slow burn and erupt as a reordering of the global system in the late 2020s, the period at which China’s military build up is on pace to match the U.S.

Making either scenario more of a risk is that military planners and political leaders on all sides assume their side would be the one to win in a “short” and “sharp” fight, to use common phrases. It would be anything but.

A great power conflict would be quite different from the small wars of today that the U.S. has grow accustomed to and, in turn, others think reveal a new American weakness. Unlike the Taliban or even Saddam’s Iraq, great powers can fight across all the domains; the last time the U.S. fought a peer in the air or at sea was in 1945. But a 21st century fight would also see battles for control of two new domains.

The lifeblood of military communications and control now runs through space, meaning we’d see humankind’s first battles for the heavens. Similarly, we’d learn “cyber war” is far more than stealing Social Security Numbers or e-mail from gossipy Hollywood executives, but the takedown of the modern military nervous system and Stuxnet-style digital weapons. Worrisome for the U.S. is that last year, the Pentagon’s weapons tester found nearly every single major weapons program had “significant vulnerabilities” to cyber attack.

A total mindshift is required for this new reality. In every fight since 1945, U.S. forces have been a generation ahead in technology, having uniquely capable weapons like nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. It has not always translated to decisive victories, but it has been an edge every other nation wants. Yet U.S. forces can’t count on that “overmatch” in the future. These platforms are not just vulnerable to new classes of weapons like long-range missiles, but China, for example, overtook the EU in R&D spending last year and is on pace to match the U.S. within five years, with new projects ranging from the world’s fastest supercomputers to three different long-range drone-strike programs. And now off-the-shelf technologies can be bought to rival even the most advanced tools in the U.S. arsenal. The winner of a recent robotics test, for instance, was not a U.S. defense contractor but a group of South Korea student engineers.

An array of science-fiction-like technologies would likely make their debut in such a war, from AI battle management systems to autonomous robotics. But unlike the ISIS’s of the world, great powers can also go after high-tech’s new vulnerabilities, such as by hacking systems and knocking down GPS. The recent steps taken by the U.S. Naval Academy illustrate where things might be headed. It added a cybersecurity major to develop a new corps of digital warriors, and also requires all midshipmen learn celestial navigation, for when the high tech inevitably runs into the age old fog and friction of war.

While many leaders on both sides think any clash might be geographically contained to the straights of Taiwan or the edge of the Baltic, these technological and tactical shifts mean such a conflict is more likely to reach into each side’s homelands in new ways. Just as the Internet reshaped our notions of borders, so too would a war waged partly online.

The civilian players would also be different than those in 1941. The hub of any war economy wouldn’t be Detroit. Instead, tech geeks in Silicon Valley and shareholders in Bentonville, Ark., would wrestle with everything from microchip shortages to how to retool the logistics and allegiance of a multinational company. The new forms of civilian conflict actors like Blackwater private military firms or Anonymous hacktivist groups are unlikely to just sit out the fight.

A Chinese officer argued in a regime paper, “We must bear a third world war in mind when developing military forces.” But there is a far different attitude in Washington’s defense circles. As the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations worried last year, “If you talk about it openly, you cross the line and unnecessarily antagonize. You probably have a sense about how much we trade with that country, it’s astounding.”

This is true, but both the historic trading patterns between great powers before each of the last world wars and the risky actions and heated rhetoric out of Moscow and Beijing over the last year demonstrate it is no longer useful to avoid talking about the great power rivalries of the 21st century and the dangers of them getting out of control. We need to acknowledge the real trends in motion and the real risks that loom, so that we can take mutual steps to avoid the mistakes that could create such an epic fail of deterrence and diplomacy. That way we can keep the next world war where it belongs, in the realm of fiction.

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

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